Why, sometimes, primaries? Intraparty democratization as a default selection mechanism in German and Spanish mainstream parties

Abstract

In many Western democracies, political parties have started to open to members the selection of their leaders. While most studies focus on the introduction of this new selection method, its subsequent practice is still understudied. The article contributes to our still limited knowledge of this process by looking at two multilevel countries, Germany and Spain, where the mainstream parties have sometimes organized membership ballots, especially at the regional level, for leadership selection. Thanks to two original databases on party conferences and membership ballots, the article analyzes the background of this process and reviews the most common explanations offered by the literature. It shows that they are not held when parties want to regain power, or party chairs seek their nomination, as commonly believed, but when there are intraparty leadership disputes.

Do party primaries punish women? Revisiting the trade-off between the inclusion of party members and the selection of women as party leaders

“…In some countries (typically the Anglo-Saxon countries), parties have established a single process of leadership selection: once you are party leader, unless removed, you are the party's candidate for the post of prime minister. In others (such as Germany or Spain), party rules specify an additional procedure for selecting the candidate for a chief executive office (Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2020). Certainly, often the leader of the party between elections is merely "confirmed" as its top candidate.…”

Tactical Web Use in Bumpy Times – a Comparison of Conservative Parties’ Digital Presence

“…by e-voting. Leadership literature focuses rather on mechanisms of their selection and election such as primaries and the respective voting technique (Aylott & Bolin, 2016;Chiru, et al 2015;Chiru & Gherghina, 2017) or the instrumentalization of primaries towards party membership (Astudillo & Detterbeck, 2018). For candidates and leaders, web-based communication technologies also provide a considerable and nowadays crucial channel for campaigning and relationship management.…”

Party soldiers: The selection of electoral leaders in parliamentary democracies

“…In Germany, primaries are still a relatively recent development and are restricted to specific occasions (Detterbeck, 2013;Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2018) so that the party conference remains the most common selection method. In contrast, in Spain parties could traditionally be divided into those using the party conference or a smaller intra-party body to select candidates, but since the mid-1990s primaries have been steadily gaining popularity with the traditional parties, and the newer parties use them by default (Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2018;Pruysers and Stewart, 2019). Section 6.2 provides descriptive statistics about the selectorate parties used over time.…”

“…Looking into the descriptives of this second operationalization, in 23.26% of cases, parties experience a contested change of leadership in between elections (out of the 1234 observations for which I have this variable available). Interestingly, this number decreases to around 16% of the time for German and Spanish parties, but increases to 35% for the Canadian cases, showing how German and Spanish party elites are more likely to reach an internal agreement before publicly exposing internal differences and being subsequently subjected to electoral punishment (Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2018;So, 2020).…”

“…This procedure is even codified in the 1967 party law, which states that party conferences are responsible for selecting the party leader on all political levels -national, regional and local - (Detterbeck, 2013), and this procedure has been extended to the selection of top candidates. However, some German parties have also experimented with primaries, mainly as a way to overcome internal divides by letting the members decide on the candidate (Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2018).…”